Joe Biden's Press Conference Just Set A New Presidential Record
As President Joe Biden marked the end of his first year in office, he did something that he's rarely done during his time in the White House. He held a solo press conference, only his second one since his inauguration on January 20, 2021. According to The Washington Post, if you count all his news conferences, including those with other American leaders and foreign leaders, he held fewer in his first year as president than his three immediate predecessors, Donald Trump, Barack Obama, and George W. Bush.
While Biden will take questions on the fly from the press and has done several CNN town hall events where he takes questions from voters — perhaps the most important people a president should be answering to — it took him nearly 10 months to do a second solo press conference, with the last one being on March 25, 2021 (via CNN).
However, when he did, he definitely seemed to make up for lost time as he took question after question from reporters, even offering to stay for hours at about 1 hour and 20 minutes into the event. "How long are you guys ready to go?" Biden asked with a grin. "Do you want to go for another hour or two?" (via NBC News).
Joe Biden's second solo press conference was the longest presidential one ever
One thing that surprised both the White House press corp and the Americans watching from home was the fact that President Joe Biden started his second-ever solo press conference on time at 4 p.m. EST, as Politico pointed out, something rare for many presidents. But he also clocked in at a whopping 1 hour and 51 minutes of answering questions from a room full of 30 socially distanced reporters who were chosen specifically because they represented news outlets with the most reach.
That 1 hour and 51 minutes became the longest solo presidential news conference on record (via The Washington Post), with Politico reporting that Donald Trump's longest solo press conference was 1 hour and 26 minutes and Barack Obama's was one minute longer than Trump's at 1 hour and 27 minutes.
When the nearly two-hour extravaganza was over, political strategist James Carville, who worked with Bill Clinton in the 1990s (via Britannica), told MSNBC's Ari Berman that he was impressed with Biden's performance. "It is not a minor feat to stand there for an hour and 50 minutes, on your feet, answering any kind of question that comes your way on every different kind of policy," Carville said. "So, my hat's off to the president."